Hands On: Another

Share.

Nintendo's lasts brings some unique ideas to the adventure genre.

By Anoop Gantayat

The Nintendo World Japanese national Nintendo tour, which made its first stop in the city of Nagoya on Wednesday morning, featured as one of its worldwide public debuts a playable version of Nintendo's new, original DS adventure game, Another. Being developed by Japanese developer Cing, the group behind Glass Rose on the PS2, this game looks like it's going to bring some new ideas to the adventure genre.

The demo starts off with you, playing as main character Ashley, en route to an island where you're supposed to meet your dad who's gotten himself involved in some deep trouble. Arriving at the island, your father is nowhere to be found, so you decide to go off exploring.

Another makes good use of the twin DS screens to make for a user-friendly adventure. The bottom screen displays the game world in overhead form. As you move your character around, the top screen switches off between close-up shots of key points of interest.

Movement can be handled either with the stylus or D-pad. The stylus-based movement is particularly interesting because it works surprisingly smoothly. You aren't just pointing to sections of the screen and having the character move there. When you hold the stylus down on a given point, the character will move in that direction, with the screen scrolling to follow. It's possible to make the character move about the entire world in this fashion by just holding down the stylus in a section of the screen located in the direction you'd like to go.

The stylus is also used for interacting with the game world. As you walk around, if you see an area of interest, tapping it with the stylus brings up some on-screen options, including an "investigate" option. A couple of times, this lead to stylus-based mini games in which we solved simple puzzles. One puzzle had us rotate pieces of a broken sign in order to form the complete sign which contained one half of a password. Another puzzle required that we use an item that we'd just recovered to brush off a sign in order to get the second half of the password.

Visually, Another looks like it's going to be a showpiece title for the NDS. The overhead visuals offer a 3D perspective view, with smooth movement and occasional zooming in and out of the action. The artwork for characters and still backdrops is clean and easy to look at either on the top or bottom screens.

The Another demo ended after less than ten minutes of gameplay, with a Cing representative telling us that the game still has a ways to go before completion. A release date in Japan has not been set.